 Muse in the Morning |
Time for a break from poetry…in order to create some art.
| You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note.
–Doug Floyd |
 Beams of Light |
October 2010 archive
Oct 07 2010
Muse in the Morning
Oct 07 2010
On Why Voting Matters, Or, Could You Outrun The Toxic Red Flood?
It is about a week before early voting begins for a bunch of us around the country, and that means this may be one of the last times I have to convince you that, frustrated progressive or not, you better get your butt to a ballot box or a mail-in envelope this November, because it really does mater.
Now I could give you a bunch of “what ifs” to make my point, or I could remind you how we spent all summer watching oil gush into the Gulf, and how that came to be…but, instead, it’s “Even More Current Event Day”, and we’re going to visit Hungary for a extremely real-world reminder of what can go wrong when the environmental cops are considered just too much of a burden by the environmental robbers-and if today’s story doesn’t scare you to death, I don’t know what will.
It ain’t Texas, but we will surely visit a Red River Valley…and you surely won’t like what you’re gonna see.
Oct 07 2010
Post Election Priorities and Tactics
Less than a month to go before we find out just how much the Democratic party’s perennial cluelessness on how to fight back against the political terrorism of the Right has cost them electorally.
And right after that is, of course, the absolute best time to apply Citizen Pressure on the pols. As always, the more united and organized (always a relative term w libs/dems) we can be, the more pressure we can apply. But part of that is picking the issues and tactics that will be most effective to push on.
The wider the issue’s appeal, the more oomph we can get in the form of phone calls and e-mails. The better the framing/hook/tactics we can come up with, the more participation we will attract.
So this is, for tortured souls like me who just can’t quit observing and participating in the Soap Opera of American Politics, the time to be reading the tea leaves and brainstorming.
What issues will get the most traction?
What is the most efficient tactic to exploit those issues for over all change?
Conversely, what approach should we take to revitalize issues that are being ignored, marginalized and are falling through the cracks?
This is the age of short attention span and marketing, how do we grab and hold our “audience” (pols and populace) and either convince, bludgeon, or shame them into action that moves us forward?
Oct 06 2010
A Marxist Job Interview
I found today’s job interview process both Marxist and Nazified by my American standards. Consider that I mean I have not gone through this processing in the last 22 years, which made the changes that much more noticable. The final weeks of my 99er status unemployment checks are ending so while it was a blessing some temp agency responded this screening process itself and the reasons for the creation of such infrastructure point toward corporate fascism. Now I know and realize there might be legitimate reasons companies want to screen applicants for suitability but this means maintaining a productivity level without pesky investments in say training, benefits, job safety. Kind of like having your cake and eating it too.
The screening processt though reflects upon the Charolette Iserbyte society.
Oct 06 2010
Something other than coal for West Virginia
West Virgina’s suicide pact with coal mining makes no sense. The Appalachian state could be a respectable wind energy producer and now Science reports that West Virginia is a geothermal hot spot.
Researchers have uncovered the largest geothermal hot spot in the eastern United States. According to a unique collaboration between Google and academic geologists, West Virginia sits atop several hot patches of Earth, some as warm as 200˚C and as shallow as 5 kilometers. If engineers are able to tap the heat, the state could become a producer of green energy for the region…
The find was a surprise to the scientists themselves as well as to local experts. “Nobody expected West Virginia to show up as a hot spot,” says SMU’s Maria Richards, a geothermal expert and geographer. “Just last year, I thought West Virginia, geothermal energy–I didn’t put the two together,” adds West Virginia’s official state geologist, Michael Hohn, who didn’t participate in the study.
West Virginia could change, but…
Electricity is extremely cheap in West Virginia due to its abundant coal, so geothermal energy probably can’t compete for business from utilities there. But Hohn says the state’s extensive network of power lines makes it a good candidate for exporting electricity produced by geothermal power to nearby states such as Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Madness to keep burning ‘cheap’ coal.
Oct 06 2010
Ohio Kills Benge for 1993 Murder
Ohio today killed its eighth prisoner this year, setting a state record. Michael Benge was executed for the brutal January, 1993 murder of his lover, Judith Gabbard, at 10:38 am.
The routine of state killing remains so pervasive that it’s unlikely you even noticed this execution, even though it was carried out in your name. Such is desensitization. In fact, there’s very little that was unusual about this execution. The execution ended 17 years of Benge’s confinement on death row. And yet again, it managed to dehumanized each of us.
Oct 06 2010
well said.
Compassion is the radicalism of our time.
~Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Okay … is it just me … ? Since reading and discussing the many concepts in Tocque’s essay the other day, I’m now seeing either the word compassion, or the idea, all over the place! lol.
A scattering of sentences, maybe paragraphs, from here and there this morning, that leaped out at me as being especially well said… Follow me.
And, please! feel free to add any of your own pearls!
Oct 06 2010
People Power: European Activism & Constitutional Crises
All across Europe recently there have been wave after wave of co-ordinated general strikes and massive demonstrations showing a solidarity and a unity across unions representing different kinds of workers in different countries, different levels of skill, against austerity proposals by governments, that put to shame the levels of public street activism in the US and Canada.
Fresh off a summer lecturing in Greece and France, economist, author, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Richard D. Wolff, well-known for his work on Marxian economics, economic methodology and class analysis, Yale University Ph.D. in Economics, and Professor at The New School University in New York City, gives his analysis on the massive European mobilizations and strikes. He also compares the US movement to the European one, and find the European workers to be much more advanced in their struggle.
This extraordinary unity is all built around a central demand which can be conveyed by their chief slogan: we are the working people who produce the profits, the goods, and the service of the capitalist economy; we are not going to pay for its crisis. And that’s really the central demand, that if the banks and the corporations and the speculations produced a crisis that working people had no role in-and I want to remind viewers that in Europe they didn’t even have the mortgage kind of crisis in European countries that we had here; it was a crisis of the banking sector, the financial, large corporations, and so on-the demand of the people is, we are not going to be made to pay. You’re not going to solve this economic crisis by having the government borrow money, throw the money at the banks and the big corporations, bail them out, and then make the mass of people pay by cutting government payrolls, by cutting government services, all those things called austerity.
Real News Network – October 05, 2010
European Workers Distance from US Through Action
Richard Wolff: European workers say they won’t pay for crisis while US counterparts talk of ‘One Nation
(transcript below)
Oct 06 2010
North Wales MP’s – U.S. Veterans Courts – PTSD – Justice
An important report on a Europeans review of Veterans, U.S. Veterans Courts, PTSD and Justice and Help for!
This is the type of lead the rest of the World used to look to the U.S. for, we were never perfected but working that way, and many here were once so good at it. Sadly this issue is another that comes out of our recent failed policies of destruction and terror waged on others, DeJa-Vu all over again. But shows that those who deplored our actions recently, and have been turning their backs to us in many area’s including economic, are finding some of the old America and it’s once Leadership Role in the World Community as we try to rebuild what we’ve lost and move back in the right direction!!
Oct 06 2010
Reform of Any Sort Comes with a Margin of Error
The 1961 Luis Buñuel film, Viridiana, concerns the pious exploits of a young nun who lives in a small village. Meaning to do good in imitation of Jesus’ ministry, Viridiana leaves the convent and decides to take charge of the moral education of the village’s paupers. Despite her best intentions, she finds herself exploited, abused, and taken advantage of at every possible turn. Efforts undertaken to educate the village paupers in morality are an exercise in futility, a clear example of throwing pearls before swine. After the combined shock of multifarious trauma, Viridiana (Latin for Green) seemingly succumbs to the sin of the world by the film’s conclusion. Noted reviewer Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote at the time: “The theme is that well-intended charity can often be badly misplaced by innocent, pious people. Therefore, beware of charity.”